Education beyond reason and redemption: a detour through the death drive

Abstract

In contrast to a world that often feels filled with madness and disillusion, education is associated with reason and redemption. Yet from a psychoanalytic perspective, such positivity in relation to education suggests a fantasmatic dimension – a refusal of the inevitable dislocations that prevent life from being harmonious and complete. In this paper, I seek to counter this relentless positivity through an engagement with the negativity of the death drive. Specifically, I provide analyses of two deathly films which can be read as responses to the ills and anxieties of modernity, Peter Weir’s Dead Poets Society, and Fritz Lang’s M. But whereas Dead Poets Society divides social and educational reality into good and bad, offering the former refuge in romantic individualism, M insists that society as a whole can be viewed as a destructive educational machine – a message that, though hardly comforting, might offer a starting point for rethinking education.

Keywords:

• Education policy
• psychoanalytic theory
• film studies
• death drive
• Freud
• Lacan

Notes

1. Michael Chion’s (1994) term for a sound whose source is not initially revealed.

2. Lang’s notebooks suggest he considered inserting a flashback to the trenches here to concretise this allusion (Kaes 2009, 209).